Timeline of GitHub

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Contents

Big picture

Time Period

Development summary

More details

2008

Conception, initial launch, and core features

GitHub is founded initially as Logical Awesome in February and the website launches in April. Core parts of GitHub launch during this year, including the company blog, per-project wikis, GitHub Gist, and GitHub Pages.[1]

2009 – June 2013

Continued growth and product releases

GitHub continues to release products including GitHub Enterprise, Redcarpet, and Hubot. Many companies that now regularly use GitHub – including Facebook and Google – join GitHub during this period.[2]

July 2013 – September 2015

Continued growth and product releases; outreach; attacks and censorship against the site; CEO resigns

GitHub continues to launch a series of products and enhancements to existing products. For the desktop, it releases Electron, Atom, and a desktop client. In terms of outreach, it launches the Bug Bounty Program, ChooseALicense.com, GitHub Classroom, GitHub Student Developer Pack, and the GitHub Engineering blog. The GitHub website also experiences multiple attacks as well as censorship from governments. In April 2014, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigns the company following allegations of harassment.[3]

October 2015 – present

Change in pricing model

GitHub changes its pricing model from a repository-based one to a user-based one; in the process, it introduces unlimited private repositories for paying customers.[4][5]

June 2018 – present

Microsoft era

GitHub is acquired by Microsoft and becomes its subsidiary. The service surpasses 100 million repositories.

GitHub team members announce, in a talk at Yahoo! headquarters, that within the first year of being online, GitHub has accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month alone. At this time, about 6,200 repositories have been forked at least once and 4,600 have been merged.

GitHub launches GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is similar to GitHub's public service but is designed for use by large-scale enterprise software development teams where the enterprise wishes to host their repositories behind a corporate firewall.[2]

GitHub introduces ZeroClipboard to the site, which allows for copying long lines of text and hashes with a single click.[55]

2013

000000002019-01-07-00007 January

Product

GitHub launches Contributions, an addition to user profile pages that shows which repositories the user has been active in, as well as a calendar of activities.[56][57]

2013

000000002019-01-14-000014 January

User growth, repository growth

GitHub reaches 3 million total users. At this time, GitHub also has almost 5 million repositories.[58][59]

2013

000000002019-01-21-000021 January

Censorship

GitHub is blocked in China using DNS hijacking. Confirming the block, a spokesperson for GitHub says: "It does appear that we're at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China".[60] The block would be lifted on January 23, 2013 after an online protest on Sina Weibo.[61]

2013

000000002019-01-26-000026 January

Censorship

GitHub users in China experience a man-in-the-middle attack in which attackers could have possibly intercepted traffic between the site and its users in China. The mechanism of the attack is through a fake SSL certificate.[62] Users attempting to access GitHub received a warning of an invalid SSL certificate, which due to being signed by an unknown authority was quickly detected.[63]

United States president Barack Obama signs Executive Order 13642, "Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information". As part of this new Open Data Policy, data is released on GitHub.[68][69]

GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleges that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company.[92][1]

2014

000000002019-04-01-0000April

Company

GitHub releases a statement denying Horvath's allegations of harassment.[3][93] However, following an internal investigation, GitHub would confirm the claims. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath would write on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office."[94] CEO Preston-Werner would subsequently resign from the company.

2014

000000002019-05-06-00006 May

Product

GitHub fully releases the source code of its text editor Atom. Previously, many of its libraries and packages were open source, but the editor itself was not.[95]

2014

000000002019-05-16-000016 May

The Crunchies announces that GitHub is a winner in Best Bootstrapped Startup.[1]

GitHub announces the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which gives students access to various premium services from GitHub and other tech companies.[96][97][98]

2014

000000002019-12-02-00002 December

Censorship

Roscomnadzor, Russia's regulatory agency, blocks GitHub for hosting various copies of a suicide manual. Because GitHub uses HTTPS, which encrypts data between a user's computer and GitHub, internet service providers (ISP) are forced to block the whole website instead of the pages in question. Complying ISPs included Beeline, MTS, MGTS, and Megafon. Maxim Ksenzov, the Deputy Head of the Roscomnadzor, said in a statement that the block was due to GitHub not complying with earlier takedown requests for the manual on October 10, 2014.[99] GitHub was also momentarily blocked on October 2, 2014 until the original copy of the manual was deleted.[100]

2014

000000002019-12-31-000031 December

Censorship

GitHub is blocked in India (along with 31 other Websites) over pro-ISIS content posted by users.[101] On 10 January 2015, GitHub would be unblocked. Again, on 12 Sep 2015, GitHub would be blocked all over India.[102]

2015

000000002019-01-28-000028 January

Product

GitHub announces that it has doubled its maximum payout for its bounty program to $10,000.[103]

GitHub announces the formation of GitHub Japan G.K., a subsidiary of GitHub, Inc., as well as its new office in Tokyo, Japan. This new office is the first GitHub office outside of the United States.[118][119]

GitHub announces a partnership with Yubico to allow YubiKey authentication on the GitHub website.[132]

2015

000000002019-12-03-00003 December

Userbase

Apple open-sources its programming language Swift and hosts it on GitHub.[133] This also marks the beginning of Apple using GitHub, as the company did not host anything on GitHub prior to this.[134][135]

GitHub announces that Atom, a text editor it created, has hit 1 million monthly active users.[136] GitHub knows this number because Atom comes with a package called metrics that tracks usage information using Google Analytics and sends it to GitHub.[137]

2016

000000002019-04-05-00005 April

Company

GitHub announces Spokes (called Distributed Git or DGit at the time), GitHub's application-level replication system for Git, which makes GitHub more resilient to server outages.[138][139][140]

GitHub launches a new Business service tier aimed at companies and other organizations. The service, which allows developers to more effectively collaborate and share their source code, offers an enterprise version of its tools that large companies could host in their own data centers, Amazon Web Services or Azure.[154][155]

2017

000000002019-03-03-00003 March

Product

GitHub announces a new plugin to facilitate for Unity game developers to access Git and GitHub without leaving Unity. The extension allows game developers to integrate Git and Github into their workflow, even if they're versioning large binary assets.[156][157]

2017

000000002019-04-01-00001 April

Competition

Microsoft shuts down CodePlex and recommends migration to GitHub. Brian Harry, the corporate vice president of Microsoft announces: “Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there.”[158][159][160][161][162]

2017

000000002019-05-16-000016 May

Product

GitHub launches new GitHub Desktop Beta and GitHub package for Atom text editor. Both releases provide developers with new ways of working with the GitHub software development platform and the open source Git distributed version control system, beyond the traditional command-line interface (CLI) and browser-based experience.[163][164][165]

2017

000000002019-05-22-000022 May

Product

GitHub announces GitHub Marketplace, a store for development tools that assist with tasks like continuous integration, code reviews, and project management. The purpose is to help developers easily find the right tools to improve and fine-tune their existing workflows.[166][167][168][169]

2017

000000002019-06-02-00002 June

Survey

GitHub publishes its 2017 Open Source Survey, an open set of data designed to help researchers, data enthusiasts and open-source members comprehend the overall needs of the community.[170][171]

2017

000000002019-06-05-00005 June

Survey

Large GitHub survey of open source projects finds open-source software development is almost completely dominated by men, and that most programmers neglect to write documentation. The Survey of about 6,000 contributors also finds widespread harassment.[172][173][174]

GitHub declares every friday "Open Source Day" as a new initiative to encourage people and organizations to contribute to open source projects.[178][179][180]

2017

000000002019-07-07-0000July 7

Product

GitHub releases Code Owners, a new feature that makes it easier to identify which people need to review changes that have been made to code in a repository. The feature automatically requests reviews from the code owners when a pull request changes any owned files.[181]

GitHub introduces Multiple Commit Authors, a new feature meant to improve collaboration from several developers on the same commits or pull requests and ensures every author gets attribution of their commits in their profile contributions graph and the repository’s statistics.[194][195]

2018

000000002019-02-07-00007 February

Uber stops using GitHub for in-house code, alleging that hackers behind the 2016 data breach used credentials found on the platform to gain access to an Uber’s AWS S3 bucket.[196][197][198]

2018

000000002019-02-09-00009 February

Apple orders GitHub to remove a portion of iOS source code leaked online on the previous day. The leak could allow hackers to discover iOS vulnerabilities more easily and make creating iPhonejailbreaks simpler.[199][200]

2018

000000002019-02-29-000029 February

Cybercrime

GitHub suffers and survives a record 1.35-terabit-per-second denial of service attack, which is considered to be the world's largest distributed denial of service attack to date. During the assault, the popular code sharing website's admins notice thousands of systems and devices slamming GitHub's web server. It would later be explained that the attackers hijacked something called “memcaching” — a distributed memory system known for high-performance and demand — to massively amplify the traffic volumes that were being fired at GitHub, resulting in a huge influx of traffic.[201][202][203][204]

2018

000000002019-03-23-0000March 23

Survey

Github announces the discovery of over 4 million vulnerabilities located in 500,000 plus repositories, culminating scanning started in 2017 for known common vulnerabilities and exposures.[205][206][207]

Microsoft announces new partnership with GitHub and releases the integration of Visual Studio App Center and GitHub which allows users to seamlessly automate DevOps processes right from within the GitHub experience.[212][213][214]

2018

000000002019-06-04-00004 June

Acquisition

Microsoft confirms acquisition of GitHub for US$7.5 billion. The deal is due to be completed before the end of the year. It is reported that Github would continue to operate independently.[215][216][217][218][219][220]

2018

000000002019-07-27-000027 July

Partnership

Google Cloud partners with Microsoft-owned GitHub to make a crucial element of modern software development, continuous Integration, fast and easy. In order to simplify continuous integration, Google Cloud Build is to be added to GitHub, which is connected to Google's Cloud Build, the company's new CI/Continuous Delivery (CD) platform.[221][222][223][224]

2018

000000002019-09-19-000019 September

Competition

Sharing platform GitLab announces having raised US$100 million to expand its suite of tools in competition for market share with GitHub. GitLab achieves a valuation of US$1.1 billion.[225][226][227]

Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub officially closes, after getting approval from European Union regulators.[233][234][235][236]

2018

000000002019-11-08-00008 November

Growth (repository)

GitHub announces hosting over 100 million repositories. It also announces supporting 31 million developers, who collectively have created over 1.1 billion contributions.[237][238][239][240]

2018

000000002019-11-10-000010 November

Financial

Microsoft announces having made US$1.3 billion in cash payments in connection to its acquisition of GitHub.[241][242]

2018

000000002019-12-03-00003 December

Acquisition

GitHub acquires Spectrum, a community-centric conversational platform which launched in late 2017 and became home to over 5,000 developer and designer communities.[243][244]

2019

000000002019-01-07-00007 January

Product

GitHub opens its private repositories to non-paying users, who now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators, an amount being the only limitation.[245][246][247][248][249]

2019

000000002019-02-20-000020 February

Product

GitHub facilitates researchers to look for bugs on its code-hosting site by removing the cap on its bug bounty program's top payout and offering new legal protections for white hat hackers.[250][251][252][253][254]

2019

000000002019-03-06-00006 March

Microsoft makes the source code for its Windows calculator available on GitHub, encouraging developers to participate in the development of Calculator.[255][256][257][258][259]

2019

000000002019-04-22-000022 April

Censorship/protest

A vocal group of Microsoft employees put forward a petition in defense of a trending GitHub repository they believe could be under threat of Chinese censorship. The repository, called 996.ICU, was established previously in late march by Chinese tech workers protesting extreme overwork under the gruelling 996 working hour system commonly practiced in China.[260][261][262][263][264]

↑ 38.038.1Nadia Eghbal (January 28, 2016). "We're in a brave, new post open source world". Medium. Retrieved March 1, 2017. In 2011, there were 2 million repositories on GitHub. Today, there are over 29 million. GitHub's Brian Doll noted that the first million repositories took nearly 4 years to create; getting from nine to ten million took just 48 days.

↑Rob Sanheim (January 16, 2013). "Three Million Users". GitHub. Retrieved February 23, 2017. Monday night, on the very first day of our all-hands winter summit this week, the three millionth person signed up for a GitHub account.

↑James Pearce (December 20, 2013). "2013: A Year of Open Source at Facebook". Facebook Code. Facebook. Retrieved February 28, 2017. On our GitHub account alone, we now have more than 90 repos comprising over 40,000 commits and that have collectively been forked 15,000 times.

↑Kristin Burnham (October 15, 2015). "How (and why) to start a bug bounty program". Computerworld Hong Kong. Retrieved February 25, 2017. Shawn Davenport, VP of security at GitHub, launched the company's bug bounty program a year and a half ago, but the time it took to get there was much longer, he says.

↑Frederic Lardinois (May 6, 2014). "GitHub Open Sources Its Atom Text Editor". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 23, 2017. Today, after 10 weeks in public beta, it is making all of the editor available under the MIT open source license, including all of the packages and libraries that make allow it to support different programming languages.

↑"A hackable text editor for the 21st Century". Atom. Retrieved February 25, 2017. In the same way that aggregate usage information is important when developing a web application, we've found that it's just as important for desktop applications. By knowing which Atom features are being used the most, and how the editor is performing, we can focus our development efforts in the right place.